I'm so glad my family has a balls-out-crazy immune system. It kinda farks us over a little (Auto-immune issues in both my mom: Grave's and Celiac's, and my Grandma), but we really tend to not get badly ill, at least.

I haven't taken an antibiotic in over 10 years.The problem with being a doctor (dentist anyway) is that people call all the time wanting to be seen so they can get antibiotics for toothaches. When you explain why not every toothache requires antibiotics, some understand and some threaten to go elsewhere. Many people have been primed to think antibiotics can cure everything. Some docs stand their ground and risk losing patients. Some docs don't want to see their profit margins dwindle and give the patient what they want.

Marcus Aurelius:Antibiotics allow meat producers to make a better profit margin, and that is what America is all about.

The antibiotics in meat are not the problem.

Those being prescribed incorrectly because of "magic pill" syndrome, those being sold in hand-soap, (for absolutely no good reason other than marketing and idiocy), and the tribbles out there who aren't finishing the prescribed course... those are the problem.

FTA: For gonorrhoea, a dangerous sexually-transmitted disease that infects more than a million people across the world every day, antibiotic treatments are failing fast as superbug forms of the bacteria that causes it outpace them.

Ummm... That would be 365 million new cases a year. So i guess the whole planet will have gonorrhea in about 20 years.

/don't use antibiotics much at all, only through very occasional eating of commercial chicken and meat//stay healthy my friends///this too shall pass

"All chicken is "antibiotic-free" in the sense that no antibiotic residues are present in the meat due to the withdrawal periods and other precautions required by the government and observed by the chicken companies."

You personally aren't ingesting any antibiotics whatsoever if you are eating chicken (at least insofar as you can trust the poultry suppliers to follow FDA guidelines).

Just finished a z-pak yesterday, not getting a kick. I avoid antibiotics unless absolutely necessary, though. The past five years I think I've only taken them once for a cold that suddenly got really bad about a week or two in, and in very small doses for rosacea a few years ago.

Please note: I do not have a PhD *yet* (8 months out! .. I hope. And fear.), and it is a large field. Anyways!

Currently there are two methods of mass-producing nanoscale structures (that is, combinations of nanoparticles/things more complex than a simple shape):One method is called "Top down", which is lithographically making them. This is sort-of like whittling with a laser or acids (not exactly). It's akin to how we make semiconductor chips. This has limits on both the size scale, and the types of structures you can make.The other method is called "Bottom up", or "Self assembly". This is reacting nanoparticles together chemically, to make more complex structures-but this, too, has its issues. Currently, there tends to be a high degree of disorder. Say we just want to make a simple barbell shape: Two spheres sticking to the ends of a nanorod, like this: o-o. We try to mass produce that chemically, and in the solution we might get oo, ------, o-o-o, ||, |o, and, yes, a few o-o-'s: But there's no good way to *FILTER* on that scale.The problem is that nanoscale objects are *inherently unstable* in solution: Bulk matter has a lower energy state. To keep things from just aggregating and crashing out of solution, you need to either A) Coat them with something charged, so they stay away from each other, or B) Coat them with the nanoscale equivalent of Teflon.But now you've made it so it's hard to *react* them! So you have to do fancy chemistry dances.

We are currently in the.. the best way I can describe it I "Stone-age" level of nanotech. "Sharp rock, AXE! Smooth rock, SHOVEL! Round rock, HAMMER." We are very, *very* good at making specific nanoparticles, like spheres, Rods, CUBES,(Which still seems like farking witchraft), etc, and putting them to various uses. And we are still finding new uses for these shapes! I just saw a talk where someone at our school was doing preliminary research into making surfaces (like, say, on a medical device) less hospitable to bacteria. Not by using antibiotics, or even nanoscale silver: Just by changing the surface topology. If you cover the surface with simply polystyrene (plastic) spheres of a certain size, it becomes much, much harder for (a specific) bacteria to stick and thrive. Some can still adhere here and there, but there's not *enough* of them to form a 'colony', which is what tends to make people ill and spread bacteria further through the body. Just by coating a surface in nanoscale spheres. He is currently expanding to other bacteria.

Another use is gold nanospheres, with their fantastic optical properties, but I will get to that in another post.

And we're making progress on the bottom-up front, too: I'm working with my advisor on a way of optically-directing chemical self-assembly.

Hollie Maea:Popping like candy is really bad, but the wholesale use by meat producers is even worse. But hey, meat's gotta be cheap, right?

This is the crap that has to stop.Not use, the fools whining about it. Do you not see, really?You're placing the blame on "them", the faceless and nameless that you can't affect. You do this for one reason, because you don't want to admit your daily dose of pills and hand sanitizers are the problem. You can't even consider changing, so you push the cause of the problem on to "them".

Well it's not "them", it's you. Personal responsibility, check it out sometime. Google it while you're in the doctors office wanting a Z-Pack for your hangnail.

/ Superbugs and epidemics won't happen.// I'm not lucky enough for something like that to happen.

Hollie Maea:SewerSquirrels:Where exactly is "meat cheap"? It sure as hell isn't in the mid west.

Oh, it is cheap. The whole idea of meat being cheap enough to eat all the time is a phenomenon of industrialization. Meat used to be much more of a luxury.

The concept of "cheap" must be relative then. I can barely afford meat any time (unless I'm eating a McDonald's...and I'm not sure that qualifies as meat). But corn ethanol (E85) is cheap because of gov't subsidies. Look, I don't mind riding my bike to work, just let me get a steak every once in a while.

ds615:Hollie Maea: Popping like candy is really bad, but the wholesale use by meat producers is even worse. But hey, meat's gotta be cheap, right?

This is the crap that has to stop.Not use, the fools whining about it. Do you not see, really?You're placing the blame on "them", the faceless and nameless that you can't affect. You do this for one reason, because you don't want to admit your daily dose of pills and hand sanitizers are the problem. You can't even consider changing, so you push the cause of the problem on to "them".

Well it's not "them", it's you. Personal responsibility, check it out sometime. Google it while you're in the doctors office wanting a Z-Pack for your hangnail.

/ Superbugs and epidemics won't happen.// I'm not lucky enough for something like that to happen.

I haven't taken antibiotics for anything since I lived in Papua New Guinea, so you can shove your self righteous outrage up your ass.

Once again, the link above by the goddamn CDC explains exactly why the industrialized use of antibiotics in meat production to promote high rates of growth is specially designed to cause resistance. Yes, taking antibiotics for every little ailment is very bad and needs to stop. But the meat production use is much worse, and there is science to back that up. I'm sorry that it doesn't match your precious little narrative.

Man you people just can't be satisfied can you? We vaccinate till we're blue in the face and scream at those that don't calling them morons. So here we have antibiotics out there and all over the place defeating the evil bacterial menace and then you yell at those people that overdose antibiotics. Just can't be happy can you?

Felgraf:I just saw a talk where someone at our school was doing preliminary research into making surfaces (like, say, on a medical device) less hospitable to bacteria. Not by using antibiotics, or even nanoscale silver: Just by changing the surface topology. If you cover the surface with simply polystyrene (plastic) spheres of a certain size, it becomes much, much harder for (a specific) bacteria to stick and thrive. Some can still adhere here and there, but there's not *enough* of them to form a 'colony', which is what tends to make people ill and spread bacteria further through the body. Just by coating a surface in nanoscale spheres. He is currently expanding to other bacteria.

ds615:Hollie Maea: Popping like candy is really bad, but the wholesale use by meat producers is even worse. But hey, meat's gotta be cheap, right?

This is the crap that has to stop.Not use, the fools whining about it. Do you not see, really?You're placing the blame on "them", the faceless and nameless that you can't affect. You do this for one reason, because you don't want to admit your daily dose of pills and hand sanitizers are the problem. You can't even consider changing, so you push the cause of the problem on to "them".

Well it's not "them", it's you. Personal responsibility, check it out sometime. Google it while you're in the doctors office wanting a Z-Pack for your hangnail.

/ Superbugs and epidemics won't happen.// I'm not lucky enough for something like that to happen.

As I pointed out early, I haven't been to the doctor in 6 years. Does that mean I haven't taken any antibiotics? Unfortunately I can't control the antibiotics that are in the food I eat, so I almost certainly have (unwittingly). I suppose I could go vegetarian, but fark that. It would sure be nice if the meat producers could improve the conditions of their facilities so that they weren't as prone to bacterial outbreaks, but according to you, that's totally not a problem. It's all me. Or your an idiot/troll. I know Hollie's no fool (although loaded, apparently), so I'm betting on the latter.

I don't take antibiotics. I took a full course of having two teachers for parents, one working at a day-care center, plus I attended day-care and then in high-school/college worked at a day-care. My immune system sanitizes every room I walk into.

You Are All Sheep:Man you people just can't be satisfied can you? We vaccinate till we're blue in the face and scream at those that don't calling them morons. So here we have antibiotics out there and all over the place defeating the evil bacterial menace and then you yell at those people that overdose antibiotics. Just can't be happy can you?

Actually, we'd be pretty happy if people simply limited their antibiotic usage for things they are needed for. So stop using them for things like viral infections (colds, flu, etc) where they have precisely no effect at all. And stop using them for minor infections (scrapes, for instance) where your body's immune system can easily handle it.

Got a case of typhoid? Take your antibiotics. Got a nasty case of bacterial bronchitis that you can't shake? Take your antibiotics.

Refraining from taking antibiotics when you have a cold is a lot different from skipping your immunizations, and you should feel bad for making such a comparison.

And this would've been preventable with less world-wide economic inequality. I'd like to advance the position that this is yet another capitalist tragedy of the commons driven fiasco, that could have been prevented with a bare minimum of forward looking socialistic policies..

Right. Because the vanishingly small chance of exposure from processed meat is a greater risk than the direct exposure from fellow humans...

All sorts of special...

Were you born this stupid? The bacteria become antibiotic resistant while living in the cows. Then they enter the ecosystem. You won't get the infection from eating the meat, assuming you cook it. But those bacteria will get around, as bacteria is wont to do.

You could spend the entire day reading about this stuff, if you really cared to know about it. And like I said before, you are arguing with the CDC and a host of scientific papers, not with me.

Hopefully soon we see two changes. Discontinue the use of prophylactic antibiotics in food animals, and end all govt subsidies to the meat industry (shift subsidies to fresh vegetable produce). Hopefully the resulting increase in meat prices would greatly reduce meat consumption, which would have multiple social health benefits.

Also end revolving door use in humans for avoidable STD's. You either agree to a long term program to avoid continual re-infection, or don't get treatment. Sort of like refusing a lung-transplant for someone who refuses to quit smoking.